Home is Where One Starts From
by Heart Full of Elves
Summary: A five thousand-year-old Jack comes home. Future fic.


It was inevitable that he would find his way back home eventually. He had been living, mostly, in linear time ever since his old vortex manipulator had burned out on Earth in 1869, so he couldn't exactly avoid the 51st Century. He hadn't chosen to return to the Boeshane Peninsula, he'd just ended up here. He and Captain John had been on a mission – not Time Agency-related, and not a scam either – and their ship had been knocked off course. With a shortage of fuel, they had been forced to crash-land on the nearest planet. Which was here.

Only it really had been a crash-landing. And his partner had been killed. He and John had crossed paths for the first time in a few centuries, in his own timeline, and slowly built up something resembling trust. They had been together for a couple of years now, and he was devastated by the sudden loss. He and John had had some sort of on-off relationship for years, although the time between each encounter was always longer for him than it was for John, and just when they had got past the latest betrayal – which had actually been _his_, for once – his lover had died.

His heart had been broken, someone he loved ripped away from him yet again. It was the last straw on the donkey's back, wasn't that the old Earth saying? So he had stumbled across the peninsula, making his way to the settlement where he had been born and raised. It had been a long walk, as he had stopped to smell the salt in the ocean breeze and pick up handfuls of sand to let the grains fall through his fingers, and he reminisced about the distant past.

He looked around him, at the sun, sand, sea and sky, wishing for his childhood again, wishing for the good old days, when he was still innocent and his brother was still there. It was a gut-wrenching realisation to find that he had forgotten his little brother's name. He had never thought that he could ever forget something so important. But time ran its course, like it always did, and he stopped remembering things he had always thought would stay with him.

For someone who had once been a soldier, he was much more of a lover than a fighter. In his long life he had known many, many people, of all races and origins, and had loved over and over again. There were different types of love, he had realised early on, and even though he'd travelled across time and space and lived in various places and time periods, he still wasn't sure that he had experienced all of them.

He recalled loving someone called Ianto Jones, only because he had promised to remember him, though he couldn't picture the man's face anymore. He could still remember the beautiful voice, and the peace that he had felt just by holding him, and he knew that he had once cared about the man very deeply. But he could no longer call to mind an image of him, and that always stabbed at his still-beating heart. This man had once been important to him but, millennia later, he had no idea why.

A dark-haired woman called Gwen often appeared in his memories. He remembered admiring her strengths – though he didn't know what they were anymore – and while he could still, sometimes, reconstruct her face in his memory, it was getting more and more difficult with each passing day. He did know that she was from Wales, Earth, like Ianto, but didn't know if the two had known each other or not. (The passing of time was funny like that – it made you forget what had happened when.) He thought that he had danced at her wedding, though who she had married he had no idea. It might have even been him, but he didn't think so. He could no longer remember the nature of their relationship, but he didn't think it had been a romantic or even sexual one. He had forgotten her last name and he had forgotten what it was that made her special. And that saddened him.

Around roughly the same time, there had also been a beautiful and brilliant Japanese woman. She was one of the smartest people he had ever met, far ahead of her time. He had saved her, somehow, and she'd come to work for him at – where was it? Oh yes - _Torchwood_. Her name escaped him now, though he thought it began with either _S _or _T_, but his love for her had been pure, platonic, and he could still feel the uselessness and grief he had suffered when he'd failed to protect her one last time.

He didn't recall how all these people had died. It was so long ago now, and death wasn't something he liked to remember. So he had only kept the good memories, and for that he was glad. If all the memories he had were bad ones, he would live a very miserable existence indeed. Not that he lived a particularly joyous one anymore.

However, two people he would never forget, no matter how long he lived for, were Rose Tyler and the Doctor. Rose: the blonde girl whose love for him had also condemned him to eternal life, but whom he could never hold a grudge against. Because of her actions, as he vaguely recalled telling Ianto Jones, he'd seen places he never would have seen and loved people he otherwise would never have met. She'd cursed and blessed him at the same time. Rose was long gone now, having lived and died in a parallel world, unattainable to him.

The Doctor he still bumped into occasionally, and still loved. While Rose had changed his life in making him live forever, the Doctor had changed his life by inspiring him to become a better person. The ex-Time Agent-turned-conman version of Captain Jack Harkness had died thousands of years ago. An immortal, but altogether human, man with the same face and only a few more grey hairs and lines around the eyes had taken his place. And he could never thank the Doctor enough for changing him.

Now, in the year 5049, he was home. He hadn't come home since signing up for the Time Agency, and it was nothing like he remembered, though it tended to be people that inhabited the recesses of his memory, these days, rather than places, which was why it hurt so much when he forgot.

He heard a woman call out to him, and it took him a long moment to realise that her cry was the name he had been born with. His true name. That was something he remembered. He hadn't used that name for such a long time, but he remembered. And he recognised the woman's face.

And then he was running towards her.

And then their arms were around each other and they were holding on tight, holding on for dear life.

The woman pulled back and they had a good long look at each other. She was grey-haired and appeared to be in her fifties, wearing clothes that he remembered her wearing every day of his childhood. Tears sprang to her eyes. "Where have you been?" she sobbed, her tone not demanding, just sad. "What have you seen?"

He shook his head. How could he possibly explain? It had been so long since he had seen her and so much had happened after he'd left home that it would take years to go through all his adventures and different lives. If he wrote an autobiography it would come in so many volumes that it would take up an entire library. If they still had those in the 51st Century. That was another thing that he couldn't remember.

"It's been twenty years for me," she said, "but it must be longer for you. You're older than you should be."

"You have no idea." His voice was a hoarse whisper.

"And the Time Agency? How is that working out for you?" she asked, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

"I've left the Time Agency," he told her. It would have been much more accurate to say _I left the Time Agency over five thousand years ago_, but he couldn't tell her that yet. He would, eventually, but he would need to sit her down and ask for her complete trust in him before he told his story.

"Oh. But you've returned to me," she replied with a wide smile that said just how pleased she was to see him after twenty years.

He nodded, then cupped her face in his hands and kissed her forehead. "I'm home, Ma," he said, and broke down into tears. Her arms enveloped him immediately and he held on, trying to engrave this moment into his memory.

He was more than five thousand years old, he had long since left the peninsula and said goodbye to everyone he knew there, he was one hundred times her age and had never thought he would see her again, but he still took comfort from his mother's arms, returning the embrace with a fierce sense of love. Someday he would lose her again, but for now, he would stay, to make the most of a kind of love he had not experienced since leaving her all those thousands of years ago. The love of a mother and her child.

He was home.


End file.
